Thursday, April 19, 2012

Grigg and Claire on that whole April 19th thing.

Another April 19th, and as far as I can tell not a single one of those responsible has paid any sort of price for what happened at Waco. Nor OKC, for that matter. (Anyone dim enough to believe that the buck stopped with McVeigh...well, shit, if you believe that, you'll believe anything.)

No accountability whatsoever. Nothing. (You may remember that insultingly smarmy episode featuring the phrase "full responsibility", but as far as I know, that impostor of a human being still doesn't even know what "the short sword" is.)

Fortunately, good people still refuse to let it go, in whatever ways are available to them. I'm probably too embittered to write anything constructive myself, any more, but I see that Grigg did a fine job at promoting a basic newscast (some years old, at that), and Claire has given us another capital-R Resource as far as attitude goes.

These are good things, that take basic rememberance and invest it with context. Grigg (actually, in this case, Thomas Eddlem) specializes in calling a thing what it is:

BOSTON – April 19 – National guard units seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault weapons were ambushed earlier today by elements of a paramilitary extremist faction. Military and law enforcement sources estimate that 72 were killed and more than 200 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.

Speaking after the clash, Massachusetts Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement. Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices.

The Governor, who described the group’s organizers as “criminals,” issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government’s efforts to secure law and order. The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed widespread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed assault weapons. Gage issued a ban on military style assault weapons and ammunition earlier in the week.

and there's nobody like Claire for keeping us focused on what matters, both within ourselves and in recognizing common cause in our neighbors:

While we’re not seeing the noisy resistance of the early 1990s, we’re seeing something ultimately more meaningful — quiet contempt of the people toward a government they increasingly recognize as not legitimate and absolutely not freedom-enhancing. We're seeing a big shift toward personal independence — both from the preppers of the “right” to the locavores of the “left.” For every government overreach, we can count on swift and decisive reaction. On the Internet. In social media. And in the real
world. Everywhere, everywhere, the people push back.

It's April 19th, folks. Another year and it will have been twenty, since the government afflicting us (credit Grigg with the phrase) quite publicly demonstrated its perfect willingness to stage a live-ammo show for intimidation effect, to use revolving fraud to manufacture a case in the finest Maxwell Smart "Would you believe..." tradition, to repeatedly use the phrase "this is not an assault" even while in the act of executing a military attack, to incinerate and murder every remaining man, woman and child in the building, to immediately raze and destroy any forensic evidence that might have told us how it actually happened, to lose, misplace and "disappear" any other evidence that might possibly contradict the company line--most definitely including human beings and the information they at one point contained--and of course to thoroughly prosecute the survivors.

Not a one of those who brought us this act of war has paid any price at all. In fact, they've spent much of the intervening time grooming future targets and preparing them for "processing".